What about crowd-funding?

Kickstarter already funded over $1m entertainment projects. So did the Louis CK experiment. These are far and far away from the mainstream popularity that buying movie tickets have. Don't you think that it's reasonable that web organized crowd-funding could finance even big blockbuster movies as these websites get more popular?

Imagine if popular celebrity directors with huge cult-followers like Tarantino would post a project on Kickstarter, then properly advertise it. I'd imagine a huge movie could be funded that way.

> Without copyright, for example, movies would have to recoup (most of) their production costs before ever showing the film to the public.

Kinda true, although lots of films make more money through merchandising than the box office.

But even in that situation, why can't movies be funded by crowdsourcing? I'm sure there's lots of fans of LoTR who'd be happy to crwodfund The Hobbit, for example.

Things worth being made would be prefunded, and things that aren't won't get made. As much as we enjoy entertainment, we cannot claim it is implemented as cheaply as possible.

This would let the market actually sort out what is naturally viable.

At least in my opinion, the ultimate goal of Free Software is to kill copyright. In a perfect world, everything would be public domain and at the utmost, we'd have a right to attribution (ie, you may demand to be named as the creator of something you made). Copyleft is, right now, just a "necessary evil" to bring us closer to that goal. In a sense, it's a form of using the enemies' weapons against them - but what we actually want is mutual decommissioning.

Open-source writ large is a dumb marketing gimmick. As far as useful code goes, the people who care and respect other hackers release the code anyways, copyright or no.

"Free software" vastly overestimates the value and talent of the average user--I don't feel any pity for the average City Of Farm Wars user if they don't get the source to IE.

True, but open source would continue fine without copyright -- it's just mean that everything was MIT-licensed.

Wouldnt it then shift from being a copyright enforcement issue to a contract/license enforcement issue? I.e. you agreed to share your source code if you distribute, but now you didn't, so sue city?